


Every Chance We Get We Run

by bellatemple



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-18 15:39:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellatemple/pseuds/bellatemple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When it comes right down to it, Sam's been running his whole life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Chance We Get We Run

The first two weeks after everything went to shit -- after they torched Bobby, after Crowley grabbed Kevin, after _Dean fucking vanished_ , Sam crossed the continental United States three times. He never stopped anywhere for longer than eight hours at a stretch, and rarely that. He told himself he was searching for clues. He told himself he was looking for inspiration.

Even he knew he wasn't doing a very good job of either.

He swung through Long Island at the end of his first loop, nearly driving right off the road when he spotted the Big Duck. It wasn't that it was a building shaped like a giant duck -- you drove around the US long enough, and you'd see buildings shaped like pretty much everything you could think of, and everything else besides -- but that the duck's eye seemed to lock onto his own, and he couldn't tear his gaze away. The cold, unblinking, solid black eye on the side of its proportionately tiny head stared accusingly even as he pulled to a stop, hands clenched into fists on the wheel.

_You should have been there,_ it seemed to say. _You shouldn't have let Dean go after Dick alone._

Sam forced himself to blink, then scrubbed at his eyes.

_What kind of brother are you, Sam?_

He took a deep breath and groped for something to drink.

_What kind of brother are you?_

His flailing hand knocked the dial on the radio, and the sudden blast of static followed by the warm, sympathetic coo of a woman's voice knocked him out of his fugue.

Delilah. Dean would wring his neck if he caught him listening to her show in the Impala, though Sam had caught Dean pausing a little too long on it in the middle of a long drive. Sam listened for a moment longer, then switched the radio back off.

He didn't know what day it was. He'd driven through half the country already, and he hadn't stopped to sleep. He looked back up at the duck, wondering what instinct might have led him here. What insight the duck might hold. He thought maybe if he stared long enough, it would start talking again.

There was a comic about that, one of the syndicated newspaper dailies, the Delilahs of the print world. Zippy. Dean always passed it by, but Sam read it and laughed every time. Not because he got the joke -- he wasn't always one hundred percent sure there was a joke to get -- but because if he read it and laughed, it meant he was smarter than his brother. And as a kid, 'smarter than Dean' was one of the most important things he thought he could be.

_What kind of brother are you?_

Fuck.

He restarted the engine and pulled back onto the road, turning the radio on and letting Delilah's honey-and-rum voice shout through the speakers as he followed the road along the bay back to the highway.

*

On his second loop, when he dipped down south into Arizona and kept going nearly to the Mexican border just to be sure he missed Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, he started to admit the truth: he was running. He made a beeline for Roswell, just for the fucking hell of it, then veered off at the last minute when he started catching wind of what sounded like a chupacabra in the news reports. He straight up circled Kansas, swinging through Missouri into Iowa, then back across Nebraska to Colorado, with every state telling himself he was being ridiculous, that Kansas wasn't cursed or out to get him. That even if something there, some residue of his past, his birth, his battle with Lucifer lying in wait to overwhelm him again, the supernatural didn't give a flying fuck about state lines.

Then he drove from Colorado back down into Oklahoma, aiming for Arkansas, and in a few days found himself at Mile 0 in Key West, one of the farthest places from Lawrence he could get to by road without ending up in Canada.

A week after that, he was outside Seattle, and had stopped trying to convince himself he wasn't permanently fucked.

*

Sam didn't do directionless well. All his life, it seemed, he'd been fussing at someone to know where they were going, what were they doing, what was going to happen _next_. He'd argued for hours with his father about their plans, had flourished in college with the tight schedules, had clung to his goals, whether they were getting a degree or finding Dad or keeping Dean out of hell or _getting_ Dean out of hell or stopping the apocalypse or the monsters or the leviathans. And at every stage, for every goal, he'd had someone at his side. Sure, half the time they were demons out to manipulate him into being Lucifer's bitch, but at least he hadn't been alone. At least there was someone there to share the decisions.

He told himself over and over in the first few weeks after Dean disappeared that he had a goal. His brother had ended up somewhere; Crowley hadn't dragged Kevin into a void. But whenever he let his thoughts trail too close to finding either of them, he flinched away. It was too much, too big. He couldn't see his way around it, couldn't spot where to begin. And when he thought too hard about what he might find on the other end of that search, what it seemed like he _always_ found, his heart choked his lungs and he felt sick.

*

In the mountains of Montana, miles away from the nearest town, weeks from any conversation longer than what it took to book a seedy motel room, he pulled off the side of the road to take a piss and spotted a flat rock tucked in amidst the weeds. Someone had taken a sharpie to it, long enough ago that the words were faded and only half visible:

_Someone was here._

Sam dropped on his ass, nearly knocking his head on the Impala's passenger door on the way down.

_Someone was here._

And then they weren't.

He twisted and threw up into the grass.

*

And then he hit a dog.

Considering how distracted he'd been, how hard his mind was spinning and how little he'd slept, it was something of a miracle he hadn't hit something larger. He didn't even see it in the road, just felt the impact against the fender and heard the terrified, agonized yelp. Seeing it lying on the curb when he pulled over, he started to panic. His hands shook as they hovered over its dirty, mottled fur, his vision blurred when he saw it looking up at him, its own chest pumping up and down in visible jerks.

It whimpered again when he lifted it, but settled against his chest. When he circled the car, his heart in his throat, he balked. For just an instant he could hear his brother: _no dogs in the car!_

Then the dog lifted its head, its tongue coming out hesitantly to flick at his chin, and Sam remembered that Dean was gone. He couldn't help him any more. He could help the dog.

He did a quick local search for a twenty-four hour vet on his phone and drove over, his heart still pounding as he lifted the dog as carefully as he could from the backseat.

He'd be gone again in an hour, he thought. He was just passing through. He'd always be just passing through.

The dog -- and the vet -- had other ideas.

*

He tried to name it. He knew it was ridiculous, a grown man living in a motel, doing odd jobs he'd learned from Sally Struthers' correspondence school to get by while he waited for his nameless dog to heal. He wasn't Holly Golightly; he wasn't worried about the ethics of naming and claiming another living creature.

But when he looked at the dog, saw it looking back up at him, ears perked, tail flopping in a wag, the only name he could think of was "Dean."

"Dog" worked just as well.

*

Amelia saw right through him, in a way no one else ever had before. Dean had _known_ him, knew what Sam was going to say or do sometimes even before Sam did, but he didn't _see_ Sam. Not really. He had always been too close, couldn't see who Sam had grown into for all the memories of all the people Sam had been.

Amelia took one look at him and _got_ him. She'd seen the urge to run the minute they met, and she'd yelled it right out of him. She saw the drifter, saw the darkness that lurked just under the surface, and she didn't run.

She yelled more, fought him every step of the way, but she stood her ground. Because she got it.

And Sam saw right through her in return, and at the very depths, saw himself reflected back. And for the first time in a very, _very_ long time, Sam thought he might get to like the self he was seeing.

It wouldn't have been fair to Amelia to use her that way, if he didn't know she was using him right back. They were skating the edge of the same hole, and it wasn't until she tried to leave him behind that he realized how important it was that they do it together. So instead of running, instead of drifting, he turned around. He turned back, and went to her room, and he opened his mouth, and for the first time in months, he tried to explain what was going on in his head.

It was only then, sitting on the couch in Amelia's motel room, her dark rum burning in his throat, that Sam finally let himself realize he was grieving. Dean was gone -- was _dead_ \-- and he had to stop and face that or lose himself forever in the running. He could do this, he could have this friend, this lover, this . . . whatever Amelia would let herself be. He could choose this life for himself, and know that, in his way, Dean would be happy for him.

That Sam, in _his_ own way, could be happy, too.

*

Dean called, and Sam ran.

He ran from Amelia and the dog, ran to Dean and his cagey explanations and his million-yard purgatory stare, and though he stayed by Dean's side, he kept running. He fled from the guilt in his stomach and the pain in his heart and let Dean and his glares and his accusing looks chase him right up into his head, where he could lock the door and cling to the only thing that could still get through: his anger. And as Dean chased him, as Dean tried to drag out explanations that Sam couldn't give, as Dean swanned off to go hunt with his new best friend the _vampire_ , Sam's anger grew and grew.

Dean had no idea. When Sam had fought Lucifer, Dean had had somewhere to run to. He'd had Lisa and Ben, had Bobby, had _people_. Sam had no one, had had to find Amelia all on his own. How could he explain the way that thinking about hunting had sent him into fits of anxiety? How giving Dean up for dead was the only thing that kept him from driving himself into the ocean at the end of one of his continental swings?

He couldn't ask Dean to forgive him, and he couldn't make Dean understand. So he raged.

*

Dean hung up his phone and sat staring at it as Sam walked back out to the car, a bag of take out -- Amelia had loved take out, couldn't cook pasta without burning it, and she knew all the best chains, none of this greasy crap that Dean always wanted to stuff down his throat -- clutched in his hand. Sam stopped by the driver's side door, taking in Dean's expression, then nearly threw the bag in through the window at him before circling to get in the passenger side. .

"The hell crawled up your ass?" Dean grumbled. Sam didn't bother to respond. They both knew all too well the name of what was hanging over them, right now.

"Let me guess," Sam said instead, settling into the seat and fixing his best patronizing stare on Dean. "Benny?"

"No," Dean said. "The tooth fairy. Oh wait, Garth already ganked that bitch."

Sam sat back, smirk still straining his cheek muscles. "Oh good," he said. "Let's go see Benny. I've been just dying to run into him again."

"Fuck you, Sam." Dean sounded tired, and somewhere inside, Sam raged at not getting the satisfaction of Dean raging back at him. "You're the one who started this whole 'let the monster live' party in the first place. What the hell is your problem?"

"My _problem?_ "

"You're acting like a jealous teenager."

"You think I'm _jealous?_ " Sam's anger was threatening to boil over again, and he was having trouble remembering why he wasn't supposed to let it. "Of a vampire. That's fucking rich, Dean. I wouldn't even be _hunting_ any more if you hadn't shown back up."

Sam was poised to go in for the kill when Dean went still. "That's it, huh?" Dean said. "You're pissed he got my ass back out."

It was like a depth charge went off in Sam's head, rattling his whole skull. "What the _fuck_ , Dean!"

"You finally had your nice 'normal' life, your headcase brother out of the way for good. Admit it, Sam! You were happier when you thought I was dead!"

"You're goddamn right I was!" Sam breathed hard, his right hand clenched in the door, his left digging so deep into the upholstery that his nails broke. Dean sat perfectly still across from him, his eyes deadly intense.

"Get out of the car, Sam."

"Dean." Though Sam's mouth was open, nothing else came out. He couldn't take it back -- wouldn't even if he could -- and he couldn't make Dean understand. Even if he had the words to explain it, Dean had never given up on anything so completely as Sam had on him. Dean had never felt the rush of freedom that came with having absolutely nothing to lose, or the calm that followed when it was time to heal. Dean had never let go of anything in his life.

"Get out of my fucking car."

Except, perhaps, right now.

There was something in Sam's throat, but he resisted the urge to cough or swallow. If he let himself, he knew he'd feel guilty -- knew he could all but drown in it, over what he'd just said. But he was done feeling guilty. He nodded, little more than a quick dip of the chin, and opened the passenger side door.

The most important thing, he told himself as he watched Dean pull away, was that he stood his ground.

Whatever else happened, Sam was done running.


End file.
